Position Player

Dear San Francisco Giants,

            I know what you’re thinking.  You’re sitting there thinking you’ve got all the bases covered, if you’ll pardon the phrase.  You’ve got a five-star rotation if everyone either stays who they were last year or, in the case of Tim Lincecum, returns to who they were every year but last year.  You’ve got a first baseman on the cusp of breaking out as a solid 280-290 hitter who’ll bring in 20 homers and make opposing pitchers regret ignoring the bottom of the order.  You’ve got a third baseman who hits better when he loses weight and then hits unbelievably better when he gains wait after his second hand surgery, and someday will hit a homerun off a pitch bounced in front of the plate.  You’ve got a second baseman who is sitting on a 20 game hitting streak as a new season looms and seemed impossible to get out in the playoffs.   You’ve got a shortstop that got this quote, “I'm prepared to say with confidence that Brandon Crawford is the best defensive shortstop in baseball,” from believe it or not, a dodger; A.J. Ellis.  You’ve got four exciting outfield choices all with World Series experience, a solid bullpen with more options than a Hyundai Sonata hybrid, experienced coaching, and the greatest ballpark in the game. You’ve got Buster Fucking Posey. Which is all great, but you need one more thing.

            It’s not chemistry and it’s not luck.  Winning brings both of those.  It’s not je ne sais quoi (which is French for I don’t know what) because I do know what.  The Giants need a team mom.  Not only do I know what position you need to add to the twice-winning World Series team but I know who should be first to occupy that position; my sister Donna McClosky.

            Donna is the greatest Giants fan between Eureka and San Luis Obispo.  She has been to more games, both at AT&T and Candlestick, than I’ve had hot meals.  She has a foul ball off a John Montefusco pitch that magically evaded outstretched hands and wide open mitts to land in her lap.  She has properly raised her children to follow the book of Giants and even converted one from the cult of dodgerdom.  Her credentials are beyond question, beyond reproach, and beyond Thunderdome.

            As the official team mom of the San Francisco Giants she would sit in the dugout and console players who flub a grounder, strike out, or give up hits. She would both relay signs to base runners and steal signs from opposing coaches and catchers.  If an opposing player, say for instance a hated dodger, takes out Marco Scutaro with a cleats-high slide into second to break up a double play, the team mother can grab a handy grounds keeper’s rake and chase the offending player off the field and halfway back to Echo Park.  A long standing family tradition. 

When the Giants win their third World Series in four years after adding this valued position to their team, every other club will scramble to do the same.  There will be some misfires sure; when the Yankees, thinking she is a beloved New York icon, add Yoko Ono only to have to fire her by the All Star Game when she insists switching the players caps to jaunty berets, or when the Reds hire Marge Schott only to realize she’s been dead since 2004.  But that will all be straighten out and sometime after the 2020 season they will start giving out an award for best team mom.

Baseball is big on naming things after players; Cy Young Award, Tommy John surgery, The Mendoza Line.  The award for the best team mom, which I’m sure will be as important to the sport as each league’s MVP, will be called the Donna-Momma-Verdict and given out on the following season’s Mother’s Day.  The first 5 DMVs will go to my sister and she will be the first team mom voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Tommy Lasorda’s plaque will be moved to indefinite storage in a janitor’s closet to make room for her’s. 

Bad Apples

One bad apple don’t spoil the whole darn bunch.

     -The Osmonds

            First of all I must admit that I thought Michael Jackson sang the above referenced song, but I guess it makes more sense for Mormons to sing about food storage techniques.  This song popped into my head recently as I was thinking about particularly bad apples in my former church.

            In Los Angeles - a city you’ll remember is actually named after the Catholic Church’s favorite mother, Mary - Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has been in the news lately because of the release of thousands of formerly secret church files that speak of 122 priests who molested children.  Mahony’s name is associated with these priests and these files because those same files lay out how he and an auxiliary bishop plotted to prevent law enforcement from learning that children had been molested.  Church law may be sketchy on how criminal these obstructions were, I wouldn’t even know where to look it up, but the California Penal Code is not.  According to that document it’s a crime:

            California Penal Code, Section 182, a-5, "If two or more persons conspire to...prevert of obstruct justice, or the due administration of the law."

            Mahony wasn’t protecting these priests so much as protecting the church.  He certainly wasn’t protecting the children.  Perhaps his thought was, as the Osmonds suggests, that a few “bad apples” don’t spoil the whole darn priesthood.  He’s probably right, but by stymieing the police and prosecutors he is leaving the bad apples in the barrel with the potentially good ones.  And perhaps he, as an apple, has become brown and rotten because he left those bad ones in.

            Roger Mahony started in Fresno, at the church my family attended.  He confirmed my sister and probably at least a couple of my brothers.  When he became Cardinal of Los Angeles, even though I don’t attend Mass any more, I took some pride that he had risen to such an important position and was from Fresno.  Maybe he took some pride in that too, and you know what goeth before a fall. 

            Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik at the Los Angeles Cathedral said he has grown weary of the intense media attention since the files were released.  In his own way as he is complaining that those outside the church want to know who broke the law, both while molesting children and covering it up, he is leaving those bad apples in there too.  He doesn’t seem to get it, but neither do his bosses; last year the Vatican issues a statement that said essentially that ordaining women is equal to child molestation.  Protecting these “criminal” priests is illegal in California, across the United States, and I would hope within the Catholic Canon.  To Mr. Kostelnik I would offer this advice about media attention, “Tough Titty.”  

           

            Sure, if you throw it out, one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.  But how may do?  Five, ten, one hundred and twenty-two?